Entertainment

CoNotes Matches Job Seekers with Cool Startups (The Startup Review)

Editor's Note:This post is part of an ongoing series at Mashable - The Startup Review, Sponsored by Sun Microsystems Startup Essentials. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

To solve these two problems, CoNotes centralizes job openings in startups in one location, and at the same time provides startups exposure by distributing those job openings to appropriate partner organizations. Some of CoNotes' other unique features include a company recommendation engine and integration with users' LinkedIn networks.

Mashable's Take: CoNotes is designed as a marketplace of sorts, matching startups with job seekers so each party can find their perfect match. The actual format of CoNotes, however, is much more of a directory of startups, similar to Startup Search but with a larger focus on startups. CoNotes moves beyond Web-based companies and features content on companies that don't even have current job openings.

For each company that has a profile on the site, there is also a section for comments, questions, and related news. The comments and questions are interactive, meaning users can peruse and contribute towards these sections, while the news section appears to be a mini feed of recent activity relevant to that company's overall industry. The job search itself, however, is rather basic and doesn't give in-depth search results or an easy-to-manage process for filtering.

As a registered CoNotes member, you can add descriptive tags to a company profile, add a company to your favorites, and take notes. If you are a job seeker using CoNotes, you can also take advantage of the service's recommendation engine, which offers three companies you may be interested in, based on your profile information. The more complete your profile information, the more CoNotes has to work with. As the profile data is still limited to things like age, gender, years of work experience and your website, it seems that CoNotes can only do so much towards recommending potentially interesting companies. The service offers only three results at a time with no explanation as to why each company may be of interest to the user, which leaves something to be desired for CoNotes' recommendation features.

There are other things that CoNotes does well, however, such as linking you and companies' LinkedIn data to CoNotes' accounts. If you see a company you're interested in, you can see how many employees it has with LinkedIn profiles, and subsequently reach out to them or learn more information about the company through LinkedIn's dedicated professional network. This particular feature offers a familiar course of action for a job seeker and aids CoNotes in its ability to extend resources through its network without having to establish an entirely new set of data or wait for users to populate its site directly.

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